WRECK ON CLYDE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 69, 23 March 1931, Page 7

WRECK ON CLYDE.

DRAMATIC SCENES.

C.P.R. Liner Goes Aground With 300 Aboard.

THRILLING RESCUE.

(United P.A.—Electric Telegraph—Copyright)

LONDON, March 22,

A thrilling- experience befel 300 passengers, including 20 mothers with babies in arms, when the liner Montclare (16,000 tons), bound from Newfoundland to Greenock, struck a rock off the barren island of Little Cumbrae, Firth of Clyde, in a fog.

The captain ordered the lifeboats to lie launched, and the passengers with lifebelts on rushed to their stations. The men obeyed the order: "Women and children first," and all were lowered safely into the boats, including a bedridden woman paralysed in both legs and a man on crutches.

The passengers were landed on a boulder-strewn shore, where they stayed two hours until they re-embarked in the lifeboats and were transferred to tugs from Greenock and taken to Largs, where they left by train for Glasgow.

The Montclare is rockbound at an angle of 45 degrees. She presents a striking spectacle, lighted as she is from stem to stern as a warning' to passing vessels.

The Montclare belongs to the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, and her port of registry is Liverpool. She was built by J. Brown and Company, Ltd., at Glasgow in 1922.

Little Cumbrae Island, Scotland, is in the county of Brute, in the Firth of Clyde, to the south of Great Cumbrae Island, which lies between the south end of the island of Bute and the coast of Ayr. The smaller island is less than two miles long and less than one mile in breadth.